The above-identified applications are directed to various concepts in which media, such as photographs, text, audio, video, etc. created on one device are sent to another pre-selected device and/or internet service account. In certain embodiments, the photos are captured by a mobile device (cell phone, camera, etc.) and communicated to a home PC via an intermediary server. The photo capturing device automatically detects newly captured photos and automatically uploads each photograph to a particular set of destinations as pre-established by the user. The destinations could be, for example, email addresses, folders on a home computer and third party online albums, such as the websites at www.photobucket.com, www.flickr.com, www.myspace.com, etc.
In some situations, the user desires to be more fully in control of what is sent and the destination(s) of the photo to be sent. For example, sometimes a user has taken a picture and the user desires to have the picture sent to the website at www.facebook.com for public display. However, sending all newly created pictures to Facebook may not be desirable. Perhaps the user desires to store some pictures in a particular storage location (local or remote from the capturing device) or perhaps the user desires to have some pictures sent to a particular individual or set of individuals on a one-time basis. Sometimes it is desired to send only one or two from a whole set of pictures to a particular location. When photos are all sent automatically to pre-established locations, as discussed in the above-identified co-pending applications, such a selective distribution is difficult to control. For example, under the system as it exists today a user who did not want a photo, or set of photos, to automatically be sent to Facebook would have to 1) go into the settings, turn the Facebook routing off, 2) get out of the settings and take the picture, and 3) go back into the settings and turn Facebook back on when a picture is about to be taken that the user desires to be sent to Facebook. The procedure that must be followed when a user wants to control destinations is less than ideal because it requires the user to perform multiple separate operations and can become confusingly complicated. Also, since an automatic forwarding system requires the user to determine prior to creating the media where the media is to be sent, it is easy to forget to change the automatic sending destination. Thus, at certain times, media may be sent to the wrong location.
One current system that performs one-time send operations is the multimedia messaging service (MMS) which allows a user to 1) take a photo, 2) invoke a message composition function of the mobile device, 3) select the new photo (or even an old photo or message), 4) insert the selected picture or message, 5) enter a phone number (or in some implementations an email address) to which to send the picture, 6) send the selected picture or message, then 7) exit the message composition function. MMS implementations on mobile phones require a tedious set of operations and although this functionality has been available to the public for over ten years, only a relatively small set of the mobile phone users based in the United States regularly sends MMS messages; further, customer satisfaction with MMS-based products is poor. For example, in order to send ten different photos using the popular Motorola RAZR phone on the AT&T network, more than 100 keypresses are required.